


Bite My Tongue

by SenkoWakimarin



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Cute, Emotionally Repressed, F/M, Hanahaki Disease, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-11-14 18:49:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18058040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: David isn't stupid, but that doesn't mean he can't do a good impression.





	Bite My Tongue

**Author's Note:**

> I have no excuse for this one, but you're all welcome.

He coughs the first petals up not long after it becomes obvious that Frank’s going to pull through, despite the blood poisoning. He’s leaning over Frank’s passed out body, checking that the IV line is laying right, fussing with the blanket he’s covered Frank in to help with the chill, and he feels the tickle, stands up and turns away, trying to keep quiet as he hacks and wheezes, until two soft, thin, curved petals fall wetly into the cup of his palm.

Staggering to his rolling chair, he lets himself sit heavily, still holding the soggy petals, heart sunk deep into his guts.

David can play dumb with the best of them, but take it down to brass tacks, he’s not stupid. Hanahaki is rare, almost unheard of in the US, but there’ve been enough hyped-up medical documentaries (not to mention all the docu-dramas… and straight up fictional dramas) about the condition for him to know. It takes him a minute to remember what it’s called, officially, because he speaks a few languages but none of them are Japanese.

He’s not stupid. He knows.

The thing is, there’s a time for emotional bullshit and there’s a time to bury your feelings and move on. It’s healthy to know the difference. Frank is the kind of man who spends all his time building walls and pushing people away. He does it with everything he has, he doesn’t _want_ closeness or affection or ties with the living.

David understands.

He’s been coughing, an achy, heavy sort of cough, for a few days now. He understands that, too. Hanahaki is diagnosed by the coughing up of “petals”, but it starts, it always starts, with the coughing.

And ends with the choking.

There’s plenty of fictions surrounding the condition, much of which David takes in over the course of the ensuing weeks, reading as he tinkers with the drone or watches the house cameras. David’s good at research and better at cutting through bullshit to find the nuggets of truth. What he learns isn’t exactly encouraging, but that’s life, isn’t it? Sometimes it sucks.

Yeah, sometimes it sucks.

Like watching Sarah kiss Frank sucks. Seeing the way Frank, caught off guard, taken aback, still leans impulsively into it, like a flower chasing the sun. David can’t see Frank’s hands, not with the angle of the camera, but he can see, anyway, the way he struggles with the urge to bring his hands up to Sarah’s face, the way he masters that impulse.

The ugly snarl of jealousy and self loathing that braids itself all around his heart, drawn like a noose to squeeze tighter and tighter as he stares at the frozen image is beyond wretched. Worse as he tries to pick that jealousy apart and realizes he can’t; he’s jealous of them both, and can’t really argue with the ugly voice in his head that assures him that Sarah and Frank deserve each other. They’re better off without him.

 _Dying now would be better,_ that little voice tells him as he stares at the image of the two best people in his life frozen on his screen, caught in a kiss he wasn’t meant to even see, not meant to be part of in any way. _They don’t need you. So go ahead and_ **_choke_** **.**

It’s the kind of bitter, hissy, precise little voice that won’t shut up until he’s downed three shots of the whiskey he keeps hidden under the array. He keeps the bottle in his hand, the rocks glass nudged by the computer, unnecessary. The voice might have shut up after three pours, but what’s the fucking point in stopping there? When he coughs, it feels like his lungs are shredding, and exactly who the fuck cares?

By the time Frank gets back, he’s drunk enough to make a fool of himself. He wakes up on his cot, blanket tossed over him, and coughs so hard he leaves flecks of blood on his pillow.

He tells Frank it’s bronchitis when he expresses something dangerously close to concern over it. If it weren’t layered over with so much seemingly genuine irritation, there might have been something like hope in Frank being worried, but as it is, it’s just another lie to paper over their relationship. Frank grits his teeth and glowers at David like he’s trying to read the truth off him, but David is very good at lying. He stares back mildly and Frank finally looks away, grumbling about a supply run. He brings back honey and, surprisingly, a package of pineapple fruit cups, the kind with chunks of fruit swimming in juice. He places both of these pointedly in front of David after he squares away the rest of the food supplies.

Frank stands over him and watches him eat a fruit cup. He says his mother had sworn by pineapple for a cough. David spends that night tossing and turning, uncertain if Frank went out of his way because he cared or just because the sound of David hacking his lungs apart was annoying him.

Things start to spiral after that. Frank loses his temper about the woman David jokingly-not-so-jokingly refers to as his girlfriend. Storms out and disappears for three miserable days. The ugly voice is a constant companion to David during those days when he has nothing else to really distract him -- the booze is gone, Frank is gone, and all David has is the hope of clearing his name and doing right by his family with the time he has left.

 _What does it matter_ the voice wonders late that second night alone, taunting. _What does it matter, you’re just going to die anyway. No hope no cure no future so why don’t you just_ **_choke._ **

When Frank trudges back in, he knows things are about ready to fall apart. He can tell by the way Frank doesn’t hardly want to look at him, the way he’s shaking apart in the bathroom as he rips shrapnel out of his own arms. Frank acts like a man who can barely contain his loathing for David, and the worst of it is that David doesn’t need the heavy pressure in his lungs to tell him his own feelings haven’t changed.

Frank might hate him more than he hates most people, but David loves him. Loves his stubbornness, loves the unflinching, uncompromising nature of him. Loves the simmering violence layered over a poet’s soul. David loves him, loves him, loves him.

The plan they work out when it all falls together is one David hates, but that’s really just par for the course. He doesn’t like lying to Madani, even by omission, and he doesn’t like letting Frank go this way, but he can’t bear to get between Frank and what realistically is his last chance at revenge.

He tries. He takes two shots to the back and crumples to the ground exactly as they planned. He lays there and listens for the second time as his wife screams, watching him die. He loves her more than he can ever say, and he just keeps hurting her. Will she have it in her to cry a third time? Is there such a thing as grief fatigue? He wouldn’t blame her if she spit on his corpse after all this. Wouldn’t blame anybody but himself, because that’s really what he does.

He fucks up. It’s his biggest goddamn talent.

 _So_ **_choke._ **

Sitting with his family, David tries not to think about what may or may not be being done to Frank. He deserves his chance, and David can’t take that from him. He won’t.

_If he dies maybe you’ll survive after all._

There’s no known correlation between the death of the object of a Hanahaki patient’s unreturned affection and the patient’s health. David knows -- he’s read goddamn near every credible piece of literature on the subject since coughing up those first two damning petals. Sometimes the patient spontaneously returned to health. In one well documented case, the patient had expired almost immediately upon hearing that his beloved had died.

More often, nothing changed. The sickness continued, leaving the patient to choose between surgery and suffocation.

 _Just lay down and_ **_choke_ ** _then._

When he can’t take the guilt and worry anymore, David excuses himself and goes to confess the rest to Madani. They’re barely in time to save Frank, the closeness of that something that will haunt David for the rest of his life, he’s sure. How much suffering had Frank been through that could have been avoided if David had just fessed up sooner, betrayed him faster. Curtis was right -- he’d had no right to drag Frank into this at all. Frank would have been better off if David had left him alone, same as Sarah would be better off if David had died for real.

He finds that he likes Hamid, Madani’s father. He’s calm and professional and more, he cares. David speaks to him briefly in private, Madani scowling but leaving the room when he asks to speak to Hamid alone. But this has to be done right.

“It is a, ah… well, we call it a psychosomatic illness, you know. This does not mean it is only in your head, only that what happens, “ Hamid taps a nail to his temple, “in here causes many things in the body we cannot control. It cannot be communicated through blood, no. And it is incredibly rare besides.”

The needle punches through his arm and his blood flows into Frank, linking them in a way that’s far beyond the physical. David trusts Hamid, believes him that he can’t make Frank sick, but he can’t help imagining those long, slender petals traveling, invisible but deadly, through the IV line. He sits beside the bed where Frank rests, a little plate with two cookies resting on his knee, and watches his blood flow into Frank, and he coughs and coughs.

It terrifies him, how much he wants to keep Frank. He needs to go back to his family, he loves them just as much as he loves this impossible, brave man, but the idea of Frank exiting his life after this is so painful. He coughs hard enough to excuse the tears that spring to his eyes.

There is no keeping Frank Castle. David does not doubt that Frank has in him a great capacity for love -- he’s seen it, hasn’t he, that love. The way he loved Karen. The way he loved Sarah. The way he loved, now and forever, his lost wife. But though Frank was capable of a great deal of love, he also desperately wanted to keep every other person in the world at arm’s length. David understood. He got it. The only way to keep the people he loved safe, Frank thought, was for him and all the dangers that surrounded him to be as far from them as possible.

As soon as he could walk again, Frank would pull away. Frank had unfinished business, for one thing, and for another David had overplayed his hand trying to keep Frank from rushing off on this suicidal bullshit. Before Frank had noticed the signs of a struggle in David’s empty house, before they’d gone and gotten Leo and worked out this whole nightmare endgame, David’s sincere little speech had come too close to a confession. Frank wasn’t stupid, and if he thought someone else genuinely cared about him, then it was time to put distance between him and them.

No one’s fault, just the way the man was wired.

Was kindness or cowardice that encouraged David to just let him go?

For a little while, back with his family, David honestly thinks maybe, somehow, he’s getting better. Hanahaki is a largely mysterious medical condition and not all researchers agree on the mechanisms of the disorder or how it starts or, in the rare cases where it does, how it resolves itself. It’s tied up with suppressed emotion and stress, which David could attest to. The urban legend of the disorder, the wives’ tale version, stated that it was caused by falling in love with someone who didn’t love you back, and if they confessed a return of your love, the disorder went away.

In reality, there were recorded cases where people resolved their personal desires and still died. And there were cases where the growths just stopped happening after months of agony. There was a surgical procedure that could be done and by all accounts worked for the people who survived it, but the effects were beyond considering.

It involved brain surgery, which was already a terrifying prospect, but the goal of the surgery was to essentially remove the part of the brain that formed attachments to others. It was dangerous, given that that same part of the brain controlled a person’s judgement and impulse control, but the theory was sound -- if a person was unable to care about or form relationships, they stopped stressing about one they couldn’t have, and whatever process got caught up in that stress went away, and the growths in the lungs stopped forming.

David has already considered the procedure and almost immediately dismissed the idea. When he spoke to Sarah about it -- because he had to, didn’t he? -- she agreed: it was beyond thinking about.

Even if the five-year projected survival rate of the surgery had magically leapt from a miserable 24.6% in men (and a whopping 28.24% for women) to a solid 100%, the cost was still far too great. He had a family, and he loved them. Living without being able to feel that was unimaginable. He’d rather die.

**_Choke._ **

Hanukkah comes and goes. Christmas. New Years.

David coughs and coughs. His throat is always sore, it seems, and his chest aches. His mouth tastes like blood no matter how often he brushes his teeth, but he never coughs more than a handful of petals on any given day. A month crawls by, then two, and there’s never any sign of Frank. David stirs honey in his tea and eats little cups of pineapple each day and refuses to think about it.

It’s the ass-end of February when Sarah finds David passed out on the bathroom floor. There’s blood in the sink, along with a wet, fleshy mass that, if one were generous and of a morbidly romantic bend, one might say looks like a flower blossom.

He wakes up in a hospital bed. He feels dry and tired and he knows exactly where he is even without opening his eyes. He’s been in enough hospital rooms; he knows the smell, the sounds. Sarah is holding his hand, her long, fine fingers curled through his.

They keep him for observation, moving him four hours after he wakes from the ER to an actual room. He’s scheduled for a series of x-rays the following day, but it’s late and the nurse tells him the doctor handling his intake said rest was the most important thing just now.

Sarah has to leave, promising to come as soon as she can tomorrow. It won’t be until after noon, he knows, unless she calls off work, which he tells her not to do. But then again, he’d told her not to take him to the hospital, and here he was.

It seems like, by that point, he’s coughing more or less nonstop. Every few minutes, like the cough that had become just background noise for the last few months was now dead set on being the only thing on his mind. The nurse gives him a weird, kidney-shaped plastic bowl to spit anything he coughs up into, telling him to call her if something _does_ come up because they’re want to look at it. Every time he calls her to take the latest bloody mess away, she hands him a fresh container.

He coughs himself to sleep and wonders how many more days of this he’s expected to drag himself through.

Sarah is waiting in his room when he returns from his x-rays the next day, just after noon. She either left work early or didn’t go in at all, and he loves her so, so much more than he can say. It makes him hate himself all the more for doing this to here.

They take in the news of the Hanahaki’s progression together, listening as the doctor warns him to try coughing carefully, because at this point there’s a very real chance of his coughing so hard that he cracks a rib. David is thinking how ridiculous it is that the human body should be capable of coughing so hard it causes serious injury, while Sarah asks about treatment options and pain management.

Because he doesn’t want Sarah to know he’s given up, and because he knows she wants him to, he agrees to stay for another night for a stress test and some more detailed imaging.

He wakes up on that third day with Frank sitting in the chair beside the bed, staring into a dog eared paperback. Seeing him now, after all this time and in this context, is like slamming face first into a wall of undefinable emotion, so all David can do is sit up against the pillows and stare at Frank, halfway certain that he’s not there at all.

“The hardest part about calling you a dumbass,” Frank says dryly, not bothering to look up as he turns the page in his book, “is that I know you’re not.”

David doesn’t know what to say, and even if he had a clue, he wouldn’t be able to trust himself to speak without crying. His eyes already sting. Frank leaves him ample time to answer, but when it’s obvious he’s not going to say anything, continues.

“When I was a kid, my Ma had a real close friend. So close, I called her Auntie, and it wasn’t until I was ten or so that I figured out we weren’t blood related. By then, Ma’s friend was dead. I remember the way she coughed, all through that last year. Ma tried to get her to talk to the guy she was caught up on, but she wouldn’t. Or couldn’t.”

At last the book is closed, and Frank’s eyes lock with his own. There’s a certain way Frank has of staring David down where it feels like he’s physically pinning him down, like David couldn’t move out of that stare if he wanted to. “Ma made her tea with honey and got her to eat pineapple. Swore by the pineapple. Really, I think she just wanted to keep her comfortable. Remind her that she was loved by _someone_.”

For a moment they just sit in silence, staring at each other. Frank’s hands are tight on the book in his lap. He stands after a long series of seconds, and moves to sit gently on the edge of David’s bed. It barely dips under his weight, because he mostly keeps his balance on his feet. He sits like he might have to run at any moment, and yet his fingers, when he brushes the tears from David’s cheeks, are gentle.

“Is there something you wanna tell me, David?”

David exhales, and it’s shaky, that breath, rough. His throat hurts and his eyes sting, but he finds himself smiling, however tremulously. “Hi, Frank, ‘s been a while,” he says, and then laughs when Frank shakes his head, trying not to smile himself. When Frank starts to slide his hand away, David raises his own hand, impulsive and quick, and holds it there, resting against his cheek. He’s dead anyway, so why not treat himself?

Why the hell not.

Curling his fingers against David’s face, Frank tilts his head to one side just slightly, letting his weight settle more firmly on the mattress. The hospital bed creaks a little and Frank’s hand is warm. “So this is how you decided you wanna go out, huh?” Frank asks, brows drawn up, mouth tucked into a faint frown again. “After all that bullshit, the bullets, the car chases, dragging my ass out of the Kentucky backwoods, you’re gonna die here, choking on your own lungs.”

All David can manage is a soft hum, the barest rise and fall of his shoulders in a shrug, because when he tries to open his mouth his breath catches, his throat tightens, and he knows exactly what kind of chance he’s being given, just as surely as he knows that anything he says will become a sob.

There’s a moment of hesitation, stillness in which Frank studies his face, looking for god-knows-what before he leans in and brushes his lips to David’s in a kiss so light and quick it barely qualifies. “I think that’s a real waste, Lieberman,” he says as he withdraws. “And I know you’re a better man than that.”

Between the two of them, there has been a tendency to speak without saying much. Talk a lot, fill the silence with noise, each making sure the other knew they were still there, because they’d both been alone for so long. Because there’s comfort in having someone react to your existence. Because whether they came together wanting it or not, they both desperately needed a friend, and they worked so well together when they actually tried, but it wasn’t in either of their natures to really open up anymore.

It was easier to make noise and sound off against each other than allow any real vulnerability. And what softness was introduced into their relationship was always invited in by David. David always had to say something first, be the first to act, make the effort.

He knows what he needs to say. He knows what he’s supposed to say.

It feels irrationally unfair that he has to. That everything he’s done and said prior isn’t enough to have driven the point home, that Frank isn’t going to be the one, for once, to open the door, to extend the hand. Maybe Frank can’t anymore, David thinks, because the alternative is that he won’t, and if that’s true then maybe this really is one sided.

Frank’s pats David’s cheek gently, the gesture almost dismissive as he sits back upright and then stands, putting distance between them again. He looks flighty in that way he has of looking when he’s drawn too close to expressing something that’s not rage. Tenderness is hard for Frank, David understands. Frank doesn’t want people close to him, because they’re the ones who get hurt worst.

“I’m gonna say something stupid,” David says quietly, and feels a smile twitch across his lips when Frank snorts, staring out the window as he stands between the bed and the chair.

“What else is new?”

“You’re an asshole, and I’m afraid of what you’ll say back,” David says, and he can see in the way Frank frowns and narrows his eyes that the fear isn’t unfair and that Frank isn’t judging him for feeling it. Might be judging himself, for having given David reason to feel it.

“You haven’t coughed once since you woke up,” Frank says finally, turning back towards him. “So I think, however much you wanna overthink this, some part a you has a pretty good idea. So look me in the eye and say it.”

David meets Frank’s gaze and feels, for a horrible moment, like he’s going to choke anyway, not on petals grown from the flesh of his lungs but on the words he’s been biting back for months and months now. He’s dizzy with them, now, his heart rate picking up as he tries to force them out. He’ll say it and Frank will laugh. He’ll say it and Frank will leave.

He’ll say it and Frank, good and genuine and after all of this, still the best friend he’s ever had, will _lie_ to try and make him better again.

 _So stay quiet, let him leave again, and don’t forget to_ **_choke._ **

Frank sighs softly and steps closer to the bed. The hand that’s not still clutching his book comes to rest gently against David’s neck, right at the crook of the shoulder. The beep of the machine monitoring his vitals steadies again, slows, like Frank’s calm can be passed through touch.

“You only ever shut up when I want you to talk,” Frank says. “Do you do this shit with Sarah?”

“Sarah probably won’t punch me to death if I say something she doesn’t like.”

Frank laughs like the sound has been shocked out of him, like he’s as surprised by the reaction as David. When he laughs like that, he looks softer, more open, and somehow that makes it feel all the more honest when he says with something almost like disbelief, “I fucking love you.”

David’s grin feels so wide it might split his face. Something eases in his chest, something sharp and painful pulls free from his heart. Because Frank means it, means it enough to say it first after all.

“I love you too,” he says, because it’s impossible to say anything else.

“Then get better. Get out of here.”

Frank steps away again, grabbing his jacket off the back of the visitor’s chair. David chews his lip for a moment, and then asks, “Will you be there, when I get out?”

One of the things David loves about Frank is that he isn’t much for lying. He has enough respect for David to take the question without acting like there isn’t a good damn reason for David asking it. He doesn’t get mad, he doesn’t get upset, he just gives it a little thought and then nods. “Yeah. I’ll be around. And we can go from there.”

David doesn’t start coughing again until Frank’s gone, and even when the painful hacking starts up again, it’s different. It feels productive instead of just oppressive.

It feels, for the first time in months, like it might get better. Like there’s a point in hope.


End file.
